Sony performs its own teardown of the PS4

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

It’s only 8 days until the PS4 launches and we officially enter the next generation of console gaming. As you’d expect, marketing surrounding the availability of the console is set to start appearing everywhere in the run up to Christmas, but today, Sony has offered a more intimate view of their new machine. Specifically, what’s on the inside of the PS4.

Wired got invited to Sony’s headquarters in Tokyo to take a look at the machine’s internal components, all under the watchful eye and white-gloved hands of Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori.

We’re all used to detailed shots of hardware teardowns in 2013, thanks mostly to the work of iFixit. But Sony decided to do the teardown itself.

What the images reveal is a very clean layout, and one I suspect will score very highly on iFixit’s repairability scale. That’s because Ootori actually took the machine apart himself for the shots over the course of 90 minutes. If this is the same unit that will ship to consumers, then it doesn’t look like any special tools will be required to open it up. There’s no glue, just an few screws holding it all together.

The close proximity of the processor and memory chips has allowed Sony/AMD to cover the whole area with one large heat sink complete with heatpipes and a single fan. That should keep the PS4 relatively quiet, with the surrounding casing clearly setup to focus on dissipating heat away from that area as efficiently and quickly as possible. The teardown also confirms something we already expected to be true – there’s no separate power brick for the PS4.

One interesting thing to note is the differences between the internals of the PS4 and Xbox One. Remember, these are meant to be very similar machines in terms of performance, and yet the motherboards look very different and Microsoft has opted for a much larger cooling setup (at least the fan looks much larger) sitting on top of the processor and memory. The comparison shots below show the differences clearly (click the images to see them full size):